Sasha Grey is not your typical porn star—not that there’s anything wrong with that most adult of trades. She’s a Godard buff. She says crazy stuff during sex scenes to mess with her co-stars. And she’s got the lead role in Steven Soderbergh’s new film The Girlfriend Experience, a verité-style portrait of an upscale Manhattan call girl. Interview sat down with the 22-year-old California native to discuss her generation of adult-film actresses (not all victims, not all idiots) and why she’d like porn to look more like the movies that play at Cannes.
DARRELL HARTMAN: Sasha Grey is your stage name. Where does it come from?
SASHA GREY: “Sasha” is the name of one of the singers of the band KMFDM. And “Grey” is based on Dr. Kinsey’s scale of sexuality. It’s basically saying everybody, man or woman, is all the way straight or all the way gay or somewhere in between. And that’s the gray scale.
DH: What are some assumptions about porn actresses that you’d like to change or correct?
SG: That you were an abused child, you’re on drugs, you have a pimp, you’re an idiot, and all you can say is, “Cock, cock, cock.” I think more and more, you’re seeing women that actually want to be here. There are plenty of us that are just as perverted as the next guy, and who enjoy doing this.
DH: A couple years ago, you caused a bit of a stir when you appeared on “The Tyra Banks Show.” She told you that you needed to do some “soul-searching.”
SG: That whole show pissed me off. But going into that, I knew they were going to mess with me. And I was willing to let that happen, for the publicity. There were so many things that were said that were not included in the show. Tyra had to get up and talk to her producers to ask what to say, because she couldn’t think for herself. That would have been nice to show on camera. But hey, it’s life.
DH: It was also a hostile crowd.
SG: The PA’s come out and say, “Okay, it’s going to be really dramatic here.” They actually tell the crowd to do stuff. And, you know, women eat that shit up. It’s 2009, and it’s still so hard to talk openly about sex without people twisting your words or not getting it whatsoever. But one of the things I did say—which obviously didn’t make it into the cut of the show—was no matter what, I’m going to leave here today changing one of your minds about me and the sex industry, specifically the adult [film] industry.
DH: And did you?
SG: I got five emails that day from women in the audience.
DH: It seems like you treat your career as seriously as anyone in any creative field.
SG: Right now, I’m working on my own production company. In the past year, I’ve worked less and less for other companies. That way, my movies are in more demand come time for my company to launch. So I really have tried to plan it out as best as I can, because entertainment is a fly-by-night industry, whether you’re in adult or mainstream.
DH: How did doing The Girlfriend Experience fit into all that?
SG: In a strictly business sense, it does benefit the sales of my movies. But I don’t really look at it as just a career. I look at it as my life. This is just another extension of who I am, an extension of my creativity. And I would love to get the opportunity to do this again, because it’s fulfilling for me. And challenging.
DH: What’s the difference between acting in adult and non-adult films?
SG: For me, it comes down to the preparation. This is going to change, because I’ll be directing everything I do now, but going into an adult scene I usually start my preparation the night before. I’ll write some loose dialogue that I want to use in the sex scene, to mess with the other performer to get a natural reaction out of them. With a film like The Girlfriend Experience, the preparation time is much longer and more in-depth.
DH: You play a high-end call girl. Did you see it as similar to being a porn actress?
SG: Well, one’s legal and one isn’t. And one’s a lot more personal than the other.
DH: How so?
SG: In adult films, you don’t have to care about someone and nurture them and talk to them and care about how they feel. You’re there to do a sex scene.
of taking it back to the late 70s, early 80s, where you went out to a theater and actually watched the movie all the way through.
DH: What films have really gotten eroticism right, in your opinion?
SG: I think Catherine Breillat does that really well. The Lovers was great. Or—I didn’t like the film so much, but I like the director [Michael Winterbottom]—9 Songs. That did a good job, the element of seduction. But I felt the film was too easy, in a way. It could have delved deeper.
DH: When it comes to seducing the viewer, is European cinema still way ahead?
SG: Oh yeah. Americans give you the violence, Europeans give you the sex. I think people have been saying that since the 70s. And I think it’s kind of pathetic that we’re still stuck—on the shock value of violence, when sex is such a natural thing for everybody.
DH: Does any particular movie scene come to mind?
SG: In [Godard’s] Pierrot le Fou there’s this scene where Anna Karina is on the beach and looks over to her lover and says, “Fuck me.” It’s this long shot and it takes forever and it shows her body and it’s dead silent. And she finally says it. It’s those little moments. It’s not hand-held, “Grrrr, put it in your face!” I’ll probably get more turned on watching a film like that than watching an adult film now, just because I know how everything’s done. Or you know somebody. Like, “Oh, this dude’s not so hot.” Or, “That guy smells, man. I’ll never work with him again.”
The Girlfriend Experience comes out Friday.